Missouri vs. Kansas basketball rivalry evolved into one of the best

David Briggs

Saturday

Feb 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMFeb 25, 2012 at 1:00 AM

When Dr. James Naismith first hung two peach baskets from a 10-foot railing at the Springfield YMCA during the winter of 1891, the Massachusetts physical education teacher simply hoped the new pastime would provide a safe cure for the cabin fever afflicting his students.

He saw basketball as a sport of grace and skill — an antidote to the savage game of football sweeping college campuses across the East.

Among Naismith's original 13 rules: "No shouldering, holding, striking, pushing, or tripping in any way of an opponent." Two fouls disqualified a player until the next made basket. Dribbling or moving with the ball was banned.

But the structured ballet Naismith envisioned — a series of rapid-fire passes freeing a teammate for a flat-footed, two-handed set shot — did not always develop.

On March 11, 1907, Naismith, who had founded the University of Kansas' basketball program a decade earlier, took his team to Columbia for a game that showcased a new reality.

In a game laced with fouls that featured MU varsity football standouts like Carl Ristine and William Driver, Missouri fittingly closed a 34-31 victory at Rothwell Gymnasium at the free-throw line. The start-up Tigers beat Kansas again the next night 34-12.

From the stands three years later, Naismith, who stepped down after the 1907 season with a career 0-2 record against Missouri, watched the MU-KU game with horror. During an especially fierce contest at Robinson Gym in Lawrence, Kan., he reportedly said, "Oh, my gracious! They are murdering my game!"

From that dubious start, Missouri and Kansas fashioned a basketball feud that became the soul of one of college sports' great rivalries.

The teams will meet today at Allen Fieldhouse for the 267th time. They have played every winter for 105 years, withstanding two world wars, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 that wiped out the football season and the fist-swinging free-for-all of 1961.

Everything but conference realignment.

For perspective of what will be lost as Missouri moves to the Southeastern Conference next season, consider the rivalry's improbable origin in the winter of 1907.

The first MU-KU game at Rothwell, a 500-seat stone building constructed for $69,000 a year earlier, was a local footnote. Basketball was considered a feminine activity — women in long skirts had played the new game competitively at Missouri since 1898. The newspapers in Lawrence and Columbia gave the men's contests a few paragraphs in favor of more prominent stories on football, track and field and train crashes. In the past decade, there had been at least 15 fatal train accidents in Missouri, including a wreck in Warrensburg that killed 29 passengers en route to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Missouri's program was founded on a whim by three freshmen from Joplin in the fall of 1906. Ristine, Driver and Hezekiah "Zeke" Henley, who played together for the Joplin YMCA, convinced MU Athletic Director Clark Hetherington to sponsor a basketball team.

They were coached by Isadore Anderson, a graduate student and former MU football player, and played a primitive scheme. According to the book, "True Sons: A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball," the Tigers' system resembled a modern soccer formation. Two forwards focused on scoring, the guards stayed back to defend the basket and the center effectively played midfield. Games plodded as players amassed fouls without fear of disqualification.

But the style yielded results. Led by Henley at forward and Ristine at center, the Tigers won their inaugural game 65-5 over Central Methodist. They entered the back-to-back games against Kansas with a 7-5 record.

KU, meanwhile, showed no signs it would evolve into a power. Naismith had produced only two winning seasons since introducing the game in Lawrence.

Originally hired by KU as a physical education teacher and a chaplain, Naismith's interests extended well beyond the court. In fact, according to the book, "James Naismith: The man who invented basketball," he preferred the other sports he helped develop at Kansas: wrestling, lacrosse, golf, fencing, track and field and rowing.

Naismith coached his final basketball game at 45 then joined the KU faculty as a professor and physician. He was particularly fascinated by the idea humans could be stretched to grow taller. A 1907 headline in the Lawrence Journal-World read, "Is Working on Shorties, Dr. Naismith has machine to make people taller." Naismith believed, according to the story, that "by stretching the body 30 minutes a day for six months it will lengthen two inches." He theorized the best time to extend the body was from 5 months to a year old.

Not surprisingly, Naismith did not micromanage his hardwood creation. Naismith saw basketball as an enjoyable pursuit and nothing more. When he learned one of his players aspired to be a basketball coach, he replied, "Why, you can't coach basketball, you just play it."

That dreamer was Forrest "Phog" Allen, who succeeded Naismith in 1907. Allen went 590-219 in 39 seasons at KU and won the 1952 national title. Before all that, he was a three-year letterman under Naismith and part of a game that meant nothing and everything: the first Border War.

Though there are no detailed accounts of the game, a Tigers basket and a foul shot by Ristine, who combined with Henley to score 30 points, broke a 31-31 tie. A day later, MU handed the Jayhawks their second-worst loss of the season.

The two nights in Columbia left Naismith as ironic trivia material. The father of basketball remains the only Kansas coach with a losing record (55-60) and, worse, a losing record against Missouri (0-2).

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